A married couple's take on domination and submission

Significant Assembly Required

I am sitting in a conference room in the Mandaly Bay hotel and casino in Las Vegas at an IT conference looking at a presentation with the words “Significant Assembly Required” in the typical PowerPoint delivery.

As I saw the words I was suddenly hit with a thought about some emails I have received lately. An individual is having an issue with their submissive. They are in a long distance relationship and the dominant is having trouble with the submissive feeling that their relationship is not headed in the right direction.

I offered some advice (although I have no experience with long distance relationships and mentioned that). My advice stated with the thought that long distance relationships likely require a lot more work within specific areas and more communication.

For example, how do you correct someone when they are not close? I am sure there are ways but my thoughts lean towards where are the rewards that go with correction? Where does the value of the relationship come from?

I once tried a long distance vanilla relationship. That was difficult enough, and it ended up crashing and burning; so I can only imagine the complexities of “enforcing your will on another” over a distance.

Which brings me to my thought. For couples and individuals looking to get into D/s, these relationships have significant assembly required.

It is easy to find someone to have sex with. It is even fairly easy to find someone to spend time with (at least in the short term) but there is a challenge to creating a long-term healthy relationship (D/s or vanilla). The song is wrong, you need more than love.

After all, I love some of the items I own for hobbies; but I can easily replace them. What is tougher is living with another human.

Let’s face it, in general people kind of suck. We have selfish times, we snore, we make weird noises when we brush our teeth… Living with someone means loving all of those things that make them, well… Them.

Relationships are like buying a desk from Ikea. You are going to have to assemble it. You are going to make mistakes at times. You are going to succeed at times. So be ready to work for what you want. If both of you want the relationship to work, then talk. Figure out what is not working and fix it.
Your relationship will assemble in the way you chose as a couple, but it takes time and care from both parties.

The term submissive does not excuse you from owning the relationship as much as the dominant. It is part of the dynamic but a healthy relationship will have a submissive and a dominant that make choices together most of the time.